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Introduction

The Empress Hotel beer parlour, or “the Emp,” is a Downtown Eastside watering hole located across the lane from the Main Street police station. Before the Vancouver Police Union built the Police Athletic Club two blocks farther north on Alexander Street, the Emp was the place for police officers to go when their shifts were over, as it offered discreet card tables for a friendly game and “last call” only meant that the staff was about to bar the door to new customers rather than require patrons to leave.

In April 1979 I had been on the job for four years and, after my shift, was at the Emp with six or seven fellow Traffic Division motorcycle trainees, drinking beer and solving all the problems of the world. Elvis had died two years earlier, and after heated debate I had achieved consensus with the group that Johnny Cash was now the world’s greatest living musical entertainer. Having resolved that issue, one of the crew asked me if I had any thoughts about what I wanted to do with my career over the course of the next thirty years. I answered, “Absolutely. I would like to ride the motorcycles for a while, walk the beat, work undercover, continue shooting with the pistol team, be part of a surveillance unit, work as a dog master and investigate murders. I’ve got no aspirations of becoming commissioned as an officer, and if I retire as a sergeant in charge of a good squad of people, that would be just fine with me.” He seemed surprised and said, “You sure seem to have it all worked out.” I responded, “I don’t know about having it all worked out, but I don’t want to look back thirty years from now and say, “That was sure boring.”

It was rarely boring.

I enjoy experiencing new things and doing what others haven’t done. I got my scuba licence when I was fifteen years old and have dived the Pacific West Coast, the Great Barrier Reef, the Cozumel Wall, the Chaak Tun Cenote in the Yucatan, the Gulf of California, Bali and the Canary Islands. At the time of this writing I have been on a pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s grave at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris five times, run with the bulls in Pamplona on twelve occasions and, at fifty-five below zero, witnessed Lance Mackey and his dog-sled team win the Iditarod in Nome for the third consecutive time. Each adventure has not much to do with the other, but perhaps they offer insight into the type of person who has written this book.

Ever since my time in Mrs. Brandon’s grade two class at Grandview Elementary School, I wanted to be a policeman and scuba diver.

The three founding principles of policing have remained the same since 1829, when Sir Robert Peel developed the metropolitan model in London, England. First, the police are accountable to the public. Second, the effectiveness of a police department is not measured by the number of arrests made, but by an absence of crime. Third, the most important part of establishing a credible police service is establishing and maintaining the public trust.